TriPlay to Acquire eMusic, a Pioneering Digital Music Service

EMusic, a pioneering digital music store that has been adrift in recent years, has been acquired by TriPlay, a cloud computing company that lets people link their media collections across a range of devices.

TriPlay, whose music service is called MyMusicCloud, bought eMusic for an undisclosed sum in a mixture of cash and stock, the company said.

Started in 1998, eMusic was among the first sites to sell music downloads. It long had a reputation as a haven for independent music — in part because in its early days the major record companies would not license their catalogs to it. But in later years, as it was challenged by iTunes, Amazon and, later, streaming outlets like Spotify, eMusic changed its model a number of times and cut back on its editorial coverage.

At its peak, eMusic was said to have had more than 400,000 subscribers, but that number was believed to have declined recently. In an interview, Tamir Koch, the chief executive of TriPlay, said only that the combined user base for eMusic and MyMusicCloud was “in the millions.”

TriPlay plans to integrate eMusic into MyMusicCloud so that customers can buy new songs from its catalog of some 25 million tracks, and then add the songs to their online collections. MyMusicCloud lets users upload an unlimited number of songs and listen to 250 of them free across all their Internet-enabled devices, from phones and computers to televisions and cars. For a subscription fee of $40 a year, customers can listen to all their songs.

Mr. Koch said that even in an era of streaming services, MyMusicCloud attracts customers who want to own music and avoid the complications of renting them through a streaming outlet. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming accounts for about 32 percent of revenue from music sales; downloads and sales of CDs and vinyl records make up most of the rest.

“The majority of the market,” Mr. Koch said, “still consumes music in a way that they buy it.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B2 of the New York edition with the headline: Business Briefing; TriPlay Buys EMusic, the Digital Music Store. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe